… In case no one’s already told you, or you haven’t already. It’s inevitable. Ask anyone who’s ever pursued anything at all – whether they succeeded or not – at some point (usually much sooner than they’d have preferred), they lost motivation. They woke up one day and before even getting out of bed, had thoughts like “what’s the point”, “you’re bound to fail”, “this is too hard”, “I can’t”.
And at that point, every single person who has ever tried doing anything, has made a decision. Either turn the volume DOWN on those thoughts & keep it moving or turn the volume UP and let them take the wheel.
When you turn the volume DOWN, you are recognizing these emotions as your mind’s natural preference for a comfortable hell over an uncomfortable paradise. You’re allowing yourself to have & acknowledging them, but then you are separating them from your reality. Awareness + separation + action = freedom. In other words, you feel like shit and do it anyway. With time & consistency, the feeling like shit will be less and less frequent. Action can exist in the face of fear (which is all any negativity ever is – it ALL boils down to fear).
When you turn the volume UP on these thoughts, you take yourself out of the driver’s seat. Before you know it, these thoughts are tying you up and throwing you in the trunk as they drive to no man’s land. And guess what? The pain and the fear are there either way… but now you’re no longer in control. You’re no longer taking any kind of action & you’re not growing. There is the pain of stagnation & the pain of growth. They can hurt equally as bad, but the outcomes are very different. The choice is yours.
So, a few things that I want you to chew on if you want the strength to turn that volume DOWN.
Define what perfection looks like to you. Define your relationship to “perfect”. Is it something you’re “striving” for (while truly knowing it’s always out of reach), or is it something you genuinely expect of yourself? If it’s the latter, it’s time to let that go. Perfect is the enemy of good. This idea of perfect will never serve you, consistently make you feel like a failure, and is the reason you keep quitting and starting over with things that, had you just kept taking small imperfect action, you would be SO far along in by now.
Define what good enough looks like, and please get VERY real with yourself. What are some things you actually have evidence of accomplishing most days on a normal week that move you in the right direction? Define your good enough action items — the things that don’t necessarily make you feel like a rockstar, but rather just a normal human doing their best — and respect them. They’re unglamorous and trivial and that’s exactly why they are so important… because they are the things you will actually do.
Now, picture what it looks like to do the bare-minimum. Visualize the weeks where you’re drowning and the best thing you did for your goals was eat enough & wake up on time. Accept that those weeks will happen and promise yourself you will not let them convince you to give up entirely. This is the long game.
Time passes anyway. Pain comes to us anyway. You can choose how you spend said time & you can choose the type of pain you’ll welcome as it pertains to certain goals. Will it be the pain of no change, the pain of coulda-shoulda-woulda (“what if I’d just taken small, consistent action? What if I didn’t give up?”), or will it be the pain of elbowing your way back into the driver’s seat each day, even if it’s just to drive a few blocks closer to your destination?